A woman who will keep on making wavesIf you're a fan of Sarah Palin, I have a distressing prediction: She isn't going to run for president in 2012.

If you're not a big fan of hers, you might be cheered by that. Don't.

The reason she isn't going to run for president is the process would bore her. That's the conclusion I've reached after reading her memoir, "Going Rogue." In it, she routinely describes a deeply rooted restlessness, a propelling engine that always seeks the next challenge.

That means the endless slog of campaigning would grow tiresome, the fundraising would grow really tiresome and the need to muzzle herself would be excruciating. (It was hard enough being muzzled by the McCain people.)

But she is not going away. She'll find her platform (probably a television show), and we'll be hearing a lot from her.

In the meantime, from "Rogue" we learn:

"¢ She's funny. She writes, when talking about the joy of eating meat, "I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals -- right next to the mashed potatoes." She persists in referring to hunted game as "local, organic protein sources." She knows she's being kind of obnoxious and she doesn't care. Good for her.

"¢ She writes glowingly about her childhood and family, and about husband Todd's family, including his Eskimo side. She makes both circles sound idyllic, yet breezily recounts that she and Todd got married by a justice of the peace after scrounging up witnesses from a retirement home across the street. Huh?

She refers to it as an elopement, but they didn't actually go anywhere. No explanation is offered, and the obvious question isn't addressed. Yet she then provides the exact dates of the 35 weeks between her marriage and subsequent birth of son Track. For a woman who has been notoriously private about her all of her pregnancies, that was weird.

"¢ It's still a mystery who helped her raise her kids. This is none of our business, of course, yet as someone who for many years juggled a job and just one child, I was curious how she managed to pull it off with five kids.

She is all about being a "working mom" and even takes great pride in the label. Yet she shies away from making any reference to child care, as though it's some dirty little secret one has to hide. (There is one mention of a babysitter for the infant Trig during the presidential campaign, along with some vague shout-outs in the book's acknowledgments.)

She even says, when defending the notion that she and her family were a bunch of divas on the campaign trail, "We buy diapers in bulk and generic peanut butter. We don't have full-time nannies or housekeepers or drivers."

She's always made it sound as if she and Todd pulled it off by being busy-busy-busy, but it turns out sometimes Todd was working on the North Slope oil fields -- hundreds of miles away -- for months at a time.

"¢ She maintains a curious blind spot about daughter Bristol's pregnancy, whining that both the Obama and the Clinton children were allowed to be off-limits to press coverage.

Surely she could see that Bristol's situation was linked to public policy positions she espoused. She isn't a "live and let live" pro-lifer, i.e., one who opposes abortion but doesn't work to make it less accessible. She wants to change the law for everyone. Daughter Piper, as an infant, was literally the poster child for Alaska's Right to Life poster.

The details of how her family handled its dilemma were legitimate news, given her willingness to legislate how other families would handle their theirs. Surely she grasps this and could explain it to her children. Instead, she played the victim and encouraged them to think in those terms as well.

(Plus, um, not for nothing, but Chelsea Clinton didn't get pregnant at 17, so the comparison isn't apt.)

"¢ She was indeed the victim of a fair amount of sexism during the campaign -- some of it at the hands of McCain's staff. Her penchant for going "off message" they chalked up to biology-is-destiny: At one point, they thought she might have postpartum depression; at another point they thought she was relying too much on the Atkins protein bars that she'd grab if the campaign schedule caused her to

miss a meal.

To her credit, having experienced that, she now has gracious things to say about two women who, in part, paved the way for her candidacy: Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton.

"¢ She divides Americans into two categories: Patriots (with a capital P) and people who disagree with her. Were she to run for president, that would grow very old, very quickly.